Sadie flicks ashes off her cigarette. “So. You think Ty wants you to make up with your dad.”

I remember the way I kept finding the empty frame on the floor in the hallway. The light on in the playhouse. The cologne. I could explain all those things away, but they seem to add up to something. They seem to add up to Ty.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I wish there were some way I could figure it out definitively, one way or the other—I’m crazy or I’m haunted—I don’t care. I just want to know.”

“I get that,” Sadie says. “I went to a medium once. Did I tell you?”

I shift on the step and stare at her. “No you didn’t tell me. When was this?”

“Madam Penny.” She takes a long drag, contorts her mouth to blow the smoke away from me. “About two years ago.”

I reach over and take her cigarette out of her hand, chuck it in the snowbank.

“Hey. What the hell?”

“I’m doing your lungs a favor. Anyway, Madam Penny,” I push on before she has time to get truly mad at me. “What was that like? I want details.”

She snorts. “It cost me a hundred bucks for a half hour. I was so sure I was going to be able to talk to my dad. I had this gold watch that he used to wear all the time, because her website said she worked better if you brought in an item that you associated with the person you wanted to speak with.”

I remember that watch. When Sadie’s dad rolled up his sleeves to teach long division, we’d see it gleaming on his wrist. Sometimes during class he’d pick one of the students to hold his watch and keep track of time when he read out loud to us—because he’d get lost in a story, he used to say.

“So what happened?” I ask.

“I got in there, and she immediately said she could feel someone on the other side reaching out to me, an older male figure, she said. A wise man.”

“Yeah? Your dad?”

“Nope.” She picks at a hole in the knee of her jeans. “Gregory, she said his name was. He was a monk who died in the twelfth century.”

I stare at her, completely baffled. “What?”

Sadie laughs at my expression. “Madam Penny said he was my spirit guide. He was there to direct me on my soul path. We each have an invisible helper in this life, she said, someone to lead us and help us along our way.”

“If that’s the case, then my spirit guide is fired,” I say.

“I know, right?”

“So . . . did you get to talk to your dad?” I ask, but I can already see the answer coming.

She looks off down the street for a few seconds before she answers. “No. She went on about this Gregory person for twenty minutes, and then I tried to get her to look at the watch and she started telling me about my grandfather, who died when I was two so I wouldn’t have known him from Adam, and then she babbled on about a great lover I had in a past life, a guy in a bomber jacket who fought in the Second World War, who loved me like the moon and stars, I remember she said. He wanted to send me a message of love and forgiveness, she kept saying. Love and forgiveness. Forgiveness and loooooove. And then my time was up.”

It’s quiet. Then Sadie finally says, “So it was a huge waste of money.”

I try to keep it positive. “Hey, but it was entertaining.”

“Right. It was a real barrel of laughs.”

“I’m sorry. That sucks.”

She shakes her head. “I was naive. God. A hundred dollars. It kills me to think about all the stuff I could have bought with a hundred dollars back then.”

“It was an experiment,” I say. “You went in with an open mind.”

“I really thought my dad would talk to me,” she says. “I thought I would get all the answers.”

She sniffles, and that’s when I realize she’s crying. It’s been two years and she’s still so disappointed that she didn’t get to speak to her dad that the thought brings her to tears.

I envy her for that.

I reach into my backpack to find a pack of tissues, which I carry around on the off chance that one of these days my tear ducts will start working again and then I’ll cry a fricking river. I hand her one. “But you still watch Long Island Medium,” I point out as she takes it and dabs at her eyes. “You’re still a believer, right?”

“Yeah, well, I prefer to think that Madam Penny was flawed.”

“Seriously, seriously flawed,” I agree.

“I was so pissed. I egged her house later,” Sadie confesses.

My mouth falls open. Then we both start snickering. Then outright laughing.

“You really are a delinquent,” I observe when our laughter fades. “Wow. What did she look like? Was she all dark and mysterious and gypsy-like?”

Sadie thinks for a minute. “She looked like a cross between my grandma and Betty White. I remember she was wearing a sweater with Christmas trees sewn on the front.” She blows her nose. Sighs. “Shit. I came here to cheer you up, not the other way around.”

“You did cheer me up,” I say. Which is true.

She bumps her shoulder into mine. “You’re a good friend, Lex.”

No, I’m not, I think. “You’re a good friend, too,” I answer. “I’m glad you saw me running that night. I’m glad you took the time to figure out why.”

“Hey, I was serious when I said we should start running together again,” she says. “Just as soon as the weather warms up. You and me. Jogging.”